Tuesday, 8 December 2009

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

My charity website uses development to challenge forms and conventions of real media products. For example, starting from top to bottom, the logo ‘Paws 4 Thought’ was made using Photoshop, which is image-editing software. This logo stands out boldly on the page and attracts the audience’s attention and straight away the audience know the website is about dogs; this challenges other websites logo’s because most websites have plain text as their logo.

The navigation bar is a convention used in almost all websites; they are usually horizontally across the page or vertically down the page. We chose to do our navigation bar horizontally as it fits in with the theme of the website.

We have chosen to make the colour theme to be light green and light blue, to represent the sky and grass as this shows a relaxed the

me of the dogs living freely.

In other pet charity websites the colour themes are usually plain and simple. We challenged those websites by using more colours. We didn’t want to make the colours to vibrant as this may turn the older generation of audience away.

This is an example of another website called ‘A lifeline for animals…’

Like my website the logo is in the top, left corner, however I feel that this logo is quite boring and unlike our logo it doesn’t show the audience what the website is about straight away. Also another convention which is similar to our website is the donate button. In this website they have made the donate button stand out in the page, just like ours. Although, I feel that we have challenged this convention as our ‘donate’ button draws the audience’s attention towards because of the photo of the dog with the paw on top.

Each page on ‘Paws 4 Thought’ the layout follows typical conventions of real media products. Most websites have the same layout on each page, so we have followed this convention to make the website simple for all ages to use and understand. For example, when you navigate to a page, the navigation button will highlight to show the user what page they are on, this is a basic form and convention that most professional websites use.

The navigation at the top highlights which page the user is on. This page can also be found when clicking on the ‘donate now’ button on the home page. We have included a photo of a puppy looking forward, as if it is looking at the user. This helps to convince the audience to donate to the charity. A lot of dog charity websites also use this convention; they include photos of dogs looking straightforward at the camera, which gives the audience the impression that the dog is looking at them for sympathy.

In conclusion, the website uses, develops and challenges forms and convention of real media products in many ways. I believe we have made this to look like a professional website as possible as we can using a simple website editor.

We will be making a website for a charity for homeless animals. There will be pages where animals are shown which the public can adopt; there will also be a page where people can donate to the charity.

The website will be aimed at a wide range of people, therefore we need to make the website appropriate for all ages. We can do this by making the colours on the website stand out, but not too bright as this will put off some of the elderly generation.

We will aim to make the website simple for all ages to use and understand but it was also be interesting and attract people to look through the website.

By making this website we are hoping to persuade a lot of people to adopt an animal or donate to the charity. We will also use images of the animals to make the audience feel sorry for them and want to give to the charity.

There will be a short clip showing some of the problems that the animals had to go through before being rescued by the charity, this will interest the audience and they will want to read on through the website, and this will help persuade them to donate to the charity or adopt an animal.